TV: Maybe ‘Lost’ isn’t lost after all
From the National Association of Broadcasters show at the Las Vegas Convention Center …
For the 1,364,987th time (I’m approximating), “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof stressed that, yes, he knows exactly where his oft-questioned series is going.
“The last scene of ‘Lost’ has been in our heads for a long period of time now,” he told broadcasters. “And that’s what we’re writing towards. And it would take some enormous sort of revelatory sea change to make us kind of change our mind about where it is we want it to go.”
I caught up with him after the session and asked if that last scene was his original vision of it, or whether it had changed over time. After all, if he’d been planning to reveal that everyone on the island was really already dead, only to find fans guessing that right away, he’d have been in trouble.
In the beginning, he said, the writing staff wasn’t thinking that far ahead, because no one really thought the series would last beyond 13 episodes. “Once ‘Lost’ was successful, that’s when we actually sat down and said, ‘OK, what are we working towards? Like, at the end of the day, what might the last scene of the show be? What are we going to explain about the island? What are we not going to explain?’ And those conversations happened very early in season one. …
“And we began setting it up in the first season. So people will look back on the first year of the show and go, ‘Wow, they did know.’ Because there’s no way we could execute what we want to execute without sort of beginning to leave some breadcrumbs along the way.”
